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the truth, now that I couldn’t go back. And so I grabbed the nearest thing to me, which was the knife she’d cut the cake with, and held it up at her with a shaking hand.
    ‘ “Stop!” I remember crying out. “Please stop. I can’t bear it.” My words tumbled out through my sobs. But Miss Hatfield only laughed.
    ‘ “This is for your own good. Do you think I’d be doing this if it weren’t?” There was a dark glint in her eyes. “Go ahead, kill me,” she dared. “I’d rather die than keep living this way.” She put her hands around mine, which were shakily grasping the knife’s handle, and brought the tip of the blade closer to her chest. “Go ahead.”
    ‘ “Just stop it,” I remember begging. “Please.”
    ‘Her hands still around mine, she jerked the blade away from her. All in an instant I felt relief, and then that, too, was shattered when she plunged the knife into her chest. I can still hear her little gasp in my ear when I close my eyes. I remember crying out, but hearing no sound save for her final utterance: “Walter.”
    ‘Death appeared glad to be able to finally reclaim her after all those years. He’d been waiting for her; watching until he found his moment. The fifth Miss Hatfield turned to dust before my eyes. There was nothing left of her existence save for the thin sheen of blood on the cake knife.’
    ‘And that’s when you knew the stories she told you were true,’ I said.
    Miss Hatfield nodded and I found myself understanding how she felt.
    ‘But why did you take her name?’
    ‘It was one of the things she explained to me, before … it happened. She told me that we become each other, since we were the only people we could trust. We need a life to turn to when we lose our own, and by taking on the name, we take on a history and another life.’
    ‘So now … Who am I?’
    ‘You are me and I am you. We’re exceptions in time.’
    ‘And I’m now Rebecca Hatfield.’ I meant to ask it as a question, but my remark came out sounding more like a statement, much more certain than I was.
    ‘You’re the seventh Miss Hatfield.’

Chapter 4
    ‘This still doesn’t explain who I am … what I am.’ I gestured to my face. ‘If I’m immortal now, why am I in someone else’s body?’
    ‘You’re not in someone else’s body,’ Miss Hatfield said in a matter-of-fact manner. ‘You’re still in your own.’
    ‘But this person is … older.’
    ‘It’s your older self, and that has nothing to do with immortality or the lake’s waters. That has to do with the clock and is a different matter entirely.’
    ‘The clock? What does the clock have to do with anything?’
    ‘I used the clock to move time forward. You weren’t immortal yet, since I had not yet given you the water. This aged you, while I, being immortal, did not age. After I gave you the water and turned you immortal, I again moved the clock, but you and your body had already entered an immortal state and therefore did not age.’
    She paused as if collecting her thoughts and continued. ‘The clock … It gives us a place in time,’ she responded cryptically. ‘Immortality displaces us from time as you used to know it. We’re visitors in every time and don’t have one of our own, so when others become so suspicious of our true nature that we must relocate, we use the clock to do so.’
    ‘You mean time travel?’
    ‘You might call it that. But travel indicates a journey with a beginning and an end, and we have neither.’
    ‘We?’ I asked. ‘The Miss Hatfields collectively?’
    She shook her head. ‘No, just you and me.’
    ‘But what of the others? Don’t they live by the same rules and in the same way?’
    ‘They used to,’ was her answer, until I pressed for more.
    ‘How do they live now?’
    ‘They don’t,’ she said coarsely, in a way that quite differed from the kind of person I thought she was. ‘The fifth Miss Hatfield left me all alone with no instructions other than to destroy any